UNAUTHORIZED FREUD: Doubters Confront a Legend
Edited by Frederick Crews
Viking, 301 pages, $24.95
FREUD’S ANSWER: The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century
By Martin Wain
Ivan R. Dee, 366 pages, $28.95
Given the beating the old man has received over the past several decades, it’s hard to remember just how big a stick Sigmund Freud used to wield. “In America today, Freud’s intellectual influence is greater than that of any other thinker,” cultural critic Philip Rieff noted happily in 1959, at the height of Freud’s posthumous influence. “He presides over the mass media, the college classroom, the chatter at parties, the playgrounds of the middle-classes where child-rearing is a prominent and somewhat anxious topic of conversation.” The founder of psychoanalysis reigned over our culture like some mordant god. His dream analysis became a sort a running gag in Hitchcock films; the Oedipus complex seeped from his books into everything from serious sociology to the sappy fiction published in the Saturday Evening Post.
All this changed, of course, in the 1960s and 1970s. Freud, once deified, was now roundly vilified–attacked as a liar, a fraud, a misogynist, a cocaine fiend. And though many of his insights remain firmly lodged in our collective unconsciousness (some of them, like Freudian slips, so fully assimilated into our worldview that they seem inseparable from common sense), Freud doesn’t get much respect these days. Indeed, much like the Kennedy assassinologists who pore over each new scrap of “evidence” that falls into their grabby hands, quite a few critics have turned Freud-bashing into a sort of career.
Of all the Freud critics on the scene today, no one is quite as noisy as Frederick Crews, a former Freudian literary critic who has become quite the angry apostate. Crews, a retired professor of English from the University of California at Berkeley, is the Kenneth Starr of Freud criticism–a tireless and ultimately tiresome searcher for scandal. His latest contribution is the edited collection “Unauthorized Freud,” a motley compilation of anti-Freudian classics. Though Crews tends to ignore those critics with whom he disagrees (Jeffrey Masson, one of the most famous, and infamous, bashers, is notably absent from the book), the collection provides a useful, if not exactly impressive, overview of this highly specialized genre–and of its many limitations.
Crews’ own argument is not exactly a subtle one, and his contributions to the volume often read like little more than a succession of epithets. “(O)ur great detective of the unconscious was incompetent from the outset,” Crews writes, “no more astute, really, than Peter Sellers’s bumbling Inspector Clouseau.” And with every attempt Freud made to extricate himself from his early mistakes, Crews argues, he sank deeper into the mire, his “initial errors compounded by ignoble dodges and fibs.” Psychoanalysis was, Crews contends, little more than an elaborate con job, a hoax perpetrated by “an overeager salesman” intent on “fame and fortune”–damn the consequences.
Freud can’t seem to do anything right: Crews ridicules him for holding certain opinions in his early years–in particular, for contending that hysteria invariably stemmed from early childhood sexual abuse–then blasts him as an opportunist for later retreating from these views. He attacks Freud for his arrogance, then seizes upon his outbursts of modesty as admissions of failure and evidence of bad faith. Ironically, Crews has a Freud-like confidence in his own opinions, at one point suggesting that the only possible flaw of his book might be that it does its job too well, “incur(ring) the risk of overkill.” (Crews, alas, doesn’t share Freud’s inclination to temper his extravagant rhetoric with occasional bursts of sardonic self-deprecation.)
If Crews’ collection helps to highlight the highly circumscribed accomplishments of Freud critics–proving pretty much beyond a doubt that the old man was no saint–it also unwittingly reveals the exhaustion of their critique: Though new Freud-bashing books appear every year, it has been quite some time since the bashers have had anything new to say. The selections in Crews’ book tread familiar grounds–lambasting Freud’s handling of several celebrated cases in his early years (and his less-than-honest accounts of these cases); documenting his embarrassing early infatuation with the wacky ideas of Wilhelm Fliess (who believed the key to virtually all human illness lay in the nose); and challenging his claims that his theories are scientific.
To the various charges proffered by the critics in Crews’ book, from the fervid Peter Swales to the dully logical Barbara Von Eckardt, it is tempting to simply answer: So what? Freud’s mistakes may have been outsized, but so were his insights. Some scientific disciplines are less exact than others (anthropology compared with chemistry, for example), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t serious intellectual disciplines that provide us with real insight into human behavior–as is psychoanalysis, which has grown and changed considerably since Freud’s day. As to Freud’s virtue, though this or that charge against his honor may be challenged (and it is worth noting that much of the case against Freud is based upon mere conjecture), there is little point in arguing against the obvious: Freud was no angel. Does it make a difference? Not really. “Why I . . . have to be thoroughly decent . . . is quite incomprehensible to me,” Freud once wrote. It’s incomprehensible to me as well. The virtuous aren’t always correct; the correct aren’t always virtuous.
Martin Wain’s “Freud’s Answer: The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century” offers a far more engaging model of Freud criticism than that of the fanatical Crews–albeit one that is equally problematic. Wain’s book suggests that Freudians and Freud bashers alike have been looking at Freudianism all wrong. Freud, wrong or right, wasn’t concerned with the individual psyche at all. “Freud and his colleagues were social, political, and economic therapists in the broadest sense,” Wain writes. “Their patient was modern Western culture at a time of maximum danger.”
Wain is hardly the first to notice the broad social and political implications of Freud’s work. Indeed, Freud noticed them himself, writing eloquently in his later years on “Civilization and Its Discontents.” But Wain is perhaps the first to insist that Freudianism is reducible to its social and political implications. It’s a rather ingenious attempt to turn psychoanalysis on its head. The “hidden, secret . . . work of psychoanalysis,” Wain argues, was “to comfort the culture” and reconcile potential rebels to the new bourgeois order. In a world torn asunder by the “twin revolutions” (French and Industrial), Freud offered a kind of quiet courage to those who would put their faith in the new ways. Warning against a romantic backlash–the politically potent appeal to nostalgia that ultimately paved the way for fascism–Freud defended the self-seeking ways of the good bourgeois citizen as the only “sane” way. “Marx wanted you to rebel,” Wain writes. “Freud wanted you to accept and had a psychological formula for that very purpose.”
For all of its Puckish charm (Wain is an engaging writer who has contributed to, among other publications, the satirical magazine Puck), “Freud’s Answer” offers a wholly reductive examination of a thinker who was much more than a mere guardian of order.
Like Kenneth Starr, Crews and other critics of his stripe are adept at ferreting out scandal but congenitally unable to see the big picture. Wain, meanwhile, can see nothing but the big picture. Whatever his flaws, Freud was quite a bit more than an Inspector Clouseau of the psyche, and his ideas–some of them incontrovertibly true, others questionable–have permanently altered and expanded our view of our inner lives. He deserves better, far better, than these two books.
